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To his brother Karl, 20th April, 1774. To the same, 20th March, 1777. To the same, 2d February, 1774. Gervinus, IV. 62.
Lessing, as might have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the new direction; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of Hamlet; A.W. Schlegel took a more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge worked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his own on single passages; and finally, Gervinus has devoted four volumes to a comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, though pushing the moral exegesis beyond all reasonable bounds.
It is significant that Gervinus, writing in 1853, spoke of that epoch as showing signs of disenchantment and exhaustion in the political sphere. In reality he was but six years removed from the beginning of an age of constructive activity the like of which has never been seen.
It is a true saying of the German historian, Gervinus, "The history of this age will no longer be only a relation of the lives of great men and of princes, but a biography of nations." At first sight, this illuminating statement seems to leave out of count the career of the mighty Napoleon. But it does not.
Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere, profound and lofty to a degree unattempted by any other interpreter, we are glad to find have been done into a suitable English translation, under the superintendence of the author himself Gervinus says somewhere in them that, as Shakspere lived and wrote, his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer.
As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all nobler ideals were under eclipse.
And even those who were too wise to be thus completely misled as to the significance and the value of the Weimarian legacy could not help feeling that for the present, at least, it were better regarded as a dead issue. One can understand the sentiment with which Gervinus closed his great history of the national literature: 'The rival contest of the arts is finished.
But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this opinion of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside Alexander's will such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte Chateaubriand, and others.
We do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, that Gervinus made it known to the world how and why Goethe was no dramatic genius; that, in the second part of Faust, he had only produced a world of phantoms and of symbols; that Wallenstein is a Macbeth as well as a Hamlet; that the Straussian reader extracts the short stories out of the Wanderjahre "much as naughty children pick the raisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake"; that no complete effect can be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and that Schiller emerged from Kant as from a cold-water cure.
Not to have seen this quite clearly enough was a weakness of the vigorous and rigorous German critics of half a century ago. And yet, some of them did see it dimly now and then. Reference was made a moment ago to Gervinus, certainly one of the most learned, thoughtful and generally meritorious of German literary historians, and it was implied that he too was affected by the bias of his age.
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